archive for May, 2006

WordPress Sort Category Posts By Title

mikesmullin — Tue, 23 May 2006 21:19:21 -0600

I have written a plugin for those who have been asking for a quick way to sort posts in category view alphabetically by title, rather than the usual chronological order. This is important if your readers don't care when things were posted. This plugin was designed for WordPress 2.0.2.
Download it here: sort_category_posts_by_title.zip To install, simply extract to /wp-content/themes/plugins and Activate from inside the WordPress Plugins panel. Currently this is designed to only alphabetize posts when viewed by category and will not alphabetize posts on the front page, search results, archives, etc. It manipulates the query_vars->order_by and query_vars->order variables from inside classes.php so that sorting is done by title, in ascending order. But the code is simple enough, if you want to make it do that yourself.

Banners vs Contextual Ads

mikesmullin — Thu, 04 May 2006 01:44:17 -0600

This is something I've been trying to say for a long time now.

From Aaron Wall's SEO Book:

Banners vs Contextual Ads:

Many web surfers have become banner blind and ignore the top part of a page. Banners have horrible conversion rates.

I do not usually use the default banner size unless I feel it fits well with the site design. The best revenue options are usually link rentals or context-based text ads.

Good advertising does not look like advertising.

One site that I work with sells links for over $500 a month per link and only made about $30 a month off AdSense. Other times AdSense can make far greater profits. Depending on the market, it may be best to use one or the other or a combination of both.

This is especially true for me because I use Firefox with the AdBlock extension and Filterset.G extension installed. I haven't seen a banner ad in almost a year.

Blogger JS Pagination Hack v1.0

mikesmullin — Tue, 02 May 2006 02:41:30 -0600

Since Blogger doesn't want to provide the feature for some reason, here is a simple JavaScript that will achieve the pagination effect you've been looking for on your blogspot.com blog.

Demo:

To see the hack in action, visit Utah Monitor.com.

Features:

Lightweight (<1.5Kb)
You can choose the number of posts to display per page
Each page can still be bookmarked normally
Customizable design via CSS stylesheets
still works traditionally if browsers don't support JavaScript (or have it disabled)
works in current versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Netscape, and Safari.

License:

No license; feel free to implement with your Blogger template whenever you like. All I ask is that you leave a comment/trackback here so others can see your implementation.

Download:

Version 1.0: js_pagination-1.0.zip

Installation:

Unzip/upload the two files pagination.js and pagination.css to Blogger.
Modify your Blogger template. You only have to insert four lines into your Blogger template, but where at is the important part.
(see template-example.html: lines 29, 30, 70, and 101)
Change your Blogger Settings.
- Login to Blogger.com
- Settings tab > Formatting sub-tab
- Set it to Show: 999 days on the main page

NOTE: Although the examples provided are for Blogger, it could really paginate anything. Here is a sample demonstrating pagination with an unordered list.

UPDATE:June 16th, 2006 - Added a template-example.html to the .ZIP package.